Archive for the ‘ Education ’ Category

Human Computer Interaction

Stanford Free Online Course (select lecture 1.1) This is the first lecture in the course. It’s only four minutes long, but like a rocket liftoff, it gets things started in a hurry. I have been waiting for fifty years for online courses – and I am not going to miss this one. Unfortunately, as I keep [ READ MORE ]

Melinda Gates: Let’s put birth control back on the agenda

TED I have been curious to see what Bill’s wife looked like. Her looks are not so awesome, but her talk (which must have been scripted by professionals) is. This is one smart gal. She goes into her Catholic childhood and upbringing. And states the problem women all over the world face when planning for [ READ MORE ]

The Cost of Going to College

Harper’s Magazine - From Ph.D. to Escort: How Debt Can Change Students This a summary of the article Easy Chair: the Price of Admission in the June issue. They have changed their formatting to HTML to make referring to it easier. I am supposed to be able to read the whole thing online, since I subscribe to [ READ MORE ]

The Fate of the One-Room Rural Schoolhouse

The loss of these was one of the greatest losses we have experienced – similar to the loss of the family farms, with which it was associated. My mother taught in these rural schools, back in the Twenties, and she loved it – mainly because of the status with which she was regarded. Recalling it [ READ MORE ]

Technology is Not Humane

This may seem like a trivial observation – but it is a one of our biggest problems. We humans, with our hyper-active nervous systems, are always trying to make ourselves better – something no other species bothers with. They are what they are, and that is good enough for them. We have invented all kinds of clever technologies [ READ MORE ]

Thinking Has Become Painful

It is painful because it can get you into trouble, and because you discover too many things you don’t want to know. One discovery can lead to another, as it almost always does, and before you know it you are in deep shit. Not someplace you want to be. The only sensible solution is to [ READ MORE ]

Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

NPR (link from Slashdot) NPR reports that Harvard physicist and professor Eric Mazur has largely gotten rid of the lecture in his classes, after finding that in lecture-based classes, students tend to commit to memory formulae and heuristics, but fail to develop deep understanding of concepts. Mazur has tried — and seemingly succeeded — to cultivate deeper learning with a [ READ MORE ]

Stanford’s Free Computer Science Courses

I Programmer How come it took fifty years for this to happen? (I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1959.) It’s about time we gave the Educational Establishment the boot! And Stanford is leading the way. I have signed up for the Human-Computer Interaction course. I have been mouthing off about this so much, [ READ MORE ]

The Non-Linear World

We have moved from a linear to a non-linear world, and the shock of this has been more than we can handle. What do I mean by this? I am talking about rate of change. Previously, this was manageable, now it is not. I am reminded of a Sixties song “Stop the world, I want to [ READ MORE ]

How do Things Effect People?

This is hard to say because there are many kinds of things and many kinds of people. But one result we can predict: the things will not change (since they are incapable of this) but the people will (since they can). We end up adapting ourselves to our things. Any successful new technology becomes successful [ READ MORE ]

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